MRC's Graham: NY Times Is 'Effete' For Questioning The Super BowlTopic: NewsBusters

Media Research Center director of media analysis Tim Graham turns in another choice bit of "media analysis" in a Jan. 26 NewsBusters post headlined "Effete New York Times Asks: 'Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?'"

Yes, Graham thinks it's "effete" to say anything negative about pro football. We're surprised he didn't use words like "swishy" or "effeminate" -- that would have more directly conveyed the homophobic intent of his words.

Meanwhile, Graham starts his rant proper by devoting an entire paragraph to a non sequitur about ... abortion? Oh, yeah, and a personal attack on the writer:

The New York Times has a very strange sense of morality. Abortion at any time for any reason is never savage. When the Kermit Gosnell case erupted, the Times could only editorialize it was irrelevant: “What does the trial of a Philadelphia doctor who is accused of performing illegal late-term abortions by inducing labor and then killing viable fetuses have to do with the debate over legal abortion?”

But on Sunday, the Times Magazine published a column titled “Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?” Writer Steve Almond, best known previously for resigning an adjunct professorship at Boston College because Condoleezza Rice was picked for commencement speaker, argued that sending men to the NFL was like sending our underclass soldiers off to war in Afghanistan (don't miss the part about the late Pat Tillman)[.]

When you're hurling insults at the publication and personally attacking the writer before you ever get around to addressing what the writer wrote, like Graham did, you've undermined your case for engaging in legitimate criticism.

An independent data analyst whose work has been published by Principia Scientific, where scientists deliberate and debate, throwing out predetermined political results in favor of the truth in the data, says the global warming activists are at it again.

They’re manipulating the data.

In this case, lowering the historical temperatures for years prior to 2000. Which makes the temperatures after that look like they’ve risen. Which makes it look like global warming.

“A newly uncovered and monumental calculating error in official U.S. government climate data shows beyond doubt that climate scientists unjustifiably added a whopping one degree of phantom warming to the official ‘raw’ temperature record,” the report says.

It comes from the discovery by independent data analyst Steven Goddard, who did a study of the official U.S. temperature records used by NASA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and others.

Unruh is simply repeating boilerplate Principia Scientific propaganda designed to obscure the fact that it's a site for global warming skeptics, which means there is, in fact, a predetermined result to the research it publishes. Principia Scientific's first chairman was noted denier Tim Ball.

Further, Steven Goddard is not only not an "independent data analyst," that's not even his real name. DeSmog Blog notes that Goddard is a pseudonym, and that he's best known for botching data to claim that Arctic Sea ice is not receding when, in fact, the opposite was true.

So we have an anonymous writer known for shoddy research making a claim at a biased website. Funny how Unruh couldn't be bothered to report those facts to his readers.

Unruh also touts how "well-known scientist Art Robinson" (a buddy of WND managing editor David Kupelian) has "gathered the signatures of 31,487 scientists who agree that there is 'no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.'" As we've previously noted, few of these scientists have any formal training in climate science, so their views are essentially meaningless to the overall debate over climate change.

A Jan. 28 AP story was sent out with the headline "New DHS chief endorses 'earned' citizenship idea." But after Newsmax got a hold of it, the headline read "Obama's New DHS Chief: Amnesty for Illegals 'Matter of National Security'."

The DHS chief said nothing about "amnesty for illegals." The only reference to "amnesty" in the article came during a reference to how Republicans have criticized immigration reform as "back-door amnesty." Indeed, as we've noted, because the proposed path to citizenship in immigration reform includes numerous conditions before citizenship would be made available, it is not, by definition, "amnesty."

Now I have seen dozens of blog postings and “news stories” about my commentary, and they all pretty much say the same thing – suggesting or outright stating that I peddled a theory that Obama was born abroad. This is patently untrue.

In the hundreds of thousands of words I have written and spoken on this subject, I have never theorized Obama was born abroad.

Farah is telling a baldfaced lie, which he's trying to parse by saying he "never theorized" that Obama was born abroad. As we've documented, Farah has repeatedly touted a discredited claim that Obama's grandmother was born in Kenya, and the website he operates published a "Kenyan birth certificate" for Obama he couldn't be bothered to authenticate before publication (it was a fake).

Farah may very narrowly portray such claims as something other than "theorizing," but it's utterly dishonest for him to claim he never promoted the idea.

Farah also spends time rehashing more birther fantasies:

This is precisely why it was so important to pay attention to the precedent Obama set by refusing to release his birth certificate for two years and then releasing one that was labeled fraudulent by the only law enforcement investigators who have examined it, as well as dozens of document experts.

More lies. Obama released a legally valid birth certificate in 2008, one that even WND proclaimed to be "authentic" before it decided it was politically advantageous to do otherwise, thus forcing it to redefine "authentic" in an editor's note applied months after the fact.

One problem has always been, and remains today, that we don’t know where he was born because he has never released an unchallenged birth certificate.

A second problem remains that even if the birth certificate is accurate and authentic, it still leaves open the question of his “natural born citizen” status because it states his father was a Kenyan citizen, unable to confer “natural born citizen” status on his son.

A third problem is that his listed mother was unable to confer that status on her son because she was a minor – too young. She hadn’t lived as a citizen in the country long enough. She later left for Indonesia and took her son with her to Indonesia where he was adopted by an Indonesian citizen.

First: Obama's birth certificate has been "challenged" only by people like Farah and Corsi who will never accept any documentation for Obama as legitimate.

Second: Farah has apparently forgotten that WND published an article admitting that the Constitution does not define "natural born citizen," and the Supreme Court has never weighed in. Thus, he cannot claim that Obama is ineligible because his father was not an American citizen.

Third: The idea that Obama's mother was "too young" to confer citizenship upon Obama is a clause that applies only to a child born abroad -- which Farah has never been able to prove he was.

But having spent years propagating a sleazy, partisan,, and completely false campaign of personal destruction for the sole purpose of making the birth certificate Obama's Vince Foster, Farah suddenly wants to wash his hands of it, declaring, "I really don’t want to talk about Obama’s eligibility any more."

Sorry, dude, that's not how it works. Until WND publishes the truth about the dishonesty of its birther crusade and apologizes for making years of false attacks, Farah does not get to walk away from the wreckage he created.

The only reason Farah is giving up the ghost now is because he has so ruined WND with perpetuating birther falsehoods that nobody believes it. If Farah wants people to trust his website, he needs to come clean.

But, again, Farah is an unrepentant liar, so the odds of that happening are pretty dismal -- even if the continued dishonesty forces WND out of business

A Jan. 28 CNSNews.com article by Michael Chapman serves up in "graphic and disturbing" nearly 1,300 words about a "gay icon" in San Francisco who pleaded guilty to felony child pornography possession.

By contrast, CNS has provided no original coverage whatsoever of the case of Ryan Loskarn, the chief of staff to Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, who was charged in December with possession of child pornography. The criminal complaint against Loskarn reported that Loskarn had purchased several videos of child pornography.

But to Chapman and CNS, this apparently is not news, even though it's considered a "local story" for CNS' Washington-area offices and could be covered with little effort, while Chapman's story on the "gay icon" case took place in San Francisco and largely cribbed from newspapers there.

All references to Loskarn in CNS' database are wire articles; it's unclear whether CNS deemed his story newsworthy enough to post any of the articles on its front page.

It's also unclear why Chapman and CNS consider a story about a San Francisco man charged with child porn to be more newsworthy than a top aide to a Republican senator charged with child porn. We bet it has something to do with the "gay icon" stuff -- by contrast, tawdry behavior by conservatives must be hidden.

Chapman's obsession got cross-promoted at NewsBusters, where Tim Graham wrote a post headlined "Pedophiles Are Not National News -- When They're Gay Rights Pioneers." He didn't mention that at CNS, pedophiles are not national news when they are conservatives.

Indeed, as usual, Unruh is interested in reporting only one side of the story, and it's the side that falsely calls immigration reform "amnesty" -- the word appears in the article 10 times. Much of Unruh's article is handed over to Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which Unruh fails to identify as an anti-immigration group.

And as usual, Unruh can't be bothered to seek out any alternative view.But then, WND's not paying him to do a thorough job of reporting -- just a highly biased one that conforms to WND's right-wing agenda.

In Tim Graham's black-and-white worldview, if you're not totally opposed to abortion, you must favor infanticide.

That's basically what Graham is arguing in a Jan. 25 NewsBusters post:

MSNBC's furor over Mike Huckabee's remarks on women and the Democrats boiled over on "Now with Alex Wagner" on Thursday afternoon. Radical feminist "comedians" Sarah Silverman and Lizz Winstead were promoted once again for their "V to Shining V" crusade for "Lady Parts Justice" -- that is, untrammeled abortion, the full Gosnell.

A black-and-white worldview is not always a good thing -- and it's an especially bad thing when you, like Graham, are supposed to be a Director of Media Analysis. How much "analysis" did Graham put into making that uninformed snap judgment?

WND's Simpson Unhappy That Abortions Mean We Can't Prove Women Don't KNow How To Say No To SexTopic: WorldNetDaily

Before Roe, women who got pregnant and regretted it had to go to abortionists who did their work out of sight of the law. Those who could afford it went out of the country. Others resorted to a variety of self-induced abortions – that’s where the phrase “coat-hanger” abortion came from. Not a pretty picture for the mother or the unborn.

That was also the day of the “shotgun wedding,” a daughter gets – as they used to say – “knocked up,” and Daddy forces the guy to marry her.

With Roe, that’s pretty much gone out of style, and so has the “coat-hanger” solution.

As one young woman who supports abortion on demand told a radio reporter in San Francisco today, “It’s important women have a choice … a coat hanger will not be my only option.”

Of course, it never was the only option, but it was a quick, down-and-dirty way to get rid of the evidence that the woman in question didn’t know how to say “no” and mean it – and the guy didn’t care.

When reports surfaced regarding Dinesh D’Souza’s inictment on charges of violating federal campaign finance laws, some serious questions were raised about the criminal investigation of the author and filmmaker.

Although the FBI and Justice Department did not explicitly reveal to which election the charges had referred, Federal Election Commission records indicated that the only political candidate to which D’Souza had ever donated was Wendy Long, a former New York senatorial candidate.

[...]

An intriguing question is why an individual with the educational background and intelligence of D’Souza would risk criminal prosecution to make a relatively small donation in a contest that involved tens of millions of dollars. After all, much larger sums of money are routinely given to campaigns through other legal vehicles including political action committees and nonprofit entities.

It may be because the violation was too blatant to ignore. Gawker examined the campaign contribution records of Wendy Long, the candidate D'Souza apparently donated to, and found that large donations well over the legal amount were made to Long's campaign on the same day in the names of D'Souza's personal assistant and (we are not making this up) the husband of D'Souza's mistress. Long’s campaign later reattributed half of the mistress’ husband’s donation to the mistress, then for some reason ultimately returned it to her. That refund is what appears to have triggered the routine FBI review that led to the charges.

But Hirsen is apparently not familiar with Occam's Razor, for he continues his conspiracy-mongering:

The discovery of D’Souza’s alleged wrongdoings are claimed to be the product of routine FBI investigations of campaign filings by various candidates. Questions remain, however, as to how investigators made the decision to look into D’Souza’s activities in the first place.

D'Souza’s prosecutor is an Indian-American Democrat, Preet Bharara, who formerly worked for New York Sen. Charles Schumer. Schumer’s close ties with the Obama administration helped to place Bharara in the powerful U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.

Becuase D’Souza is best known for having produced the documentary “2016: Obama’s America,” which portrays President Barack Obama in a rather unflattering light, Gerald Molen, who was a co-producer on the project, expressed the suspisions of numerous Obama critics regarding the idictment, saying that it amounts to a “selective prosecution,” implicitly raising the spectre that the criminal charges may be a political retaliation against D’Souza.

Because the charges against D’Souza surfaced following the highly visible media reports surrounding the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of Tea Party groups, the timing of the indictment is somewhat curious.

Additional questions still linger as to why the administration is launching a public prosecution of a high-profile critic over a relatively minor amount of money that was given to an insignificant candidate in a no-win political race?

The existence of so many questions indicate a lack of curiosity on Hirsen's part. Or, as with his defense of Mel Gibson, he may be running interference for a friend.

In an August 2012 Newsmax column, Hirsen slobbered all over D'Souza's anti-Obama film "2016: Obama's America," praising its box office performance and quoting its producer, Gerald Molen. Hirsen also touted the film, as well as Molen's credentials as a producer of "Schindler's List," in an April 2012 article as well as a July 2012 article.

Hirsen was obviously clued in about the film early enough to do some pre-release publicity for it. That suggests an undisclosed relationship between him and Molen and/or D'Souza.

Hirsen waited years -- and admist continued bad behavior by the star -- to disclose his relationship to Newsmax readers. If he has such a relationship with Molen or D'Souza, the time to disclose it is now.

NEW ARTICLE: The Birther Charade Is OverTopic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah demonstrates once and for all that WorldNetDaily's "eligibility" attacks on President Obama were a hollow, partisan sham by refusing to apply the same standard to Ted Cruz. Read more >>

Mike Ciandella uses a Jan. 23 Media Research Center Business & Media Institute item to complain that claims that "97 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing climate change" are misleading. But Ciandella is not above misleading to promote the opposite view.

Ciandella misleads by claiming that it's 97 percent of "scientists" who have reached that consensus. In fact, it's 97 percent of climate scientists -- the folks who actually study climate change.

This is an important distinction when addressing Ciandella's response to that claim: "There are many scientists who disagree with so-called 'consensus' on global warming. On Dec. 20, 2007, a report released by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee revealed more than 400 prominent scientists questioning anthropogenic climate change."

That claim comes out of a 2007 report issued by former MRC employee Marc Morano in a previous role as PR flack for global warming deniers in the House of Representatives. But if you look at the list of scientists, relatively few of them have any expertise in climatology -- there are specialists in physics, mathematics, nuclear physics, geology, philosophy, computers, chemistry, astronomy and space, which are largely, if not completely, unrelated to climatology.

Additionally, there are millions of people in the world who could be considered scientists, and Morano never provided any evidence that his list of 400 is statistically significant.

Morano is a known (and presumably well paid) bamboozler about climate change, and Ciandella knew where to go to try and further shoot down the 97-percent claim as it applies to research papers on climate change, even if he had trouble spelling the guy's name correctly: He called on "Mark Morano of Climate Depot" to call such a claim a "misdirection." Ciandella wrote:

Morano argued that the number of research papers during this time period alone isn’t a compelling factor, even if the numbers had been accurate. According to Morano, since global warming is the “state sponsored science of the day,” many scientists will incorporate mention of it into otherwise unrelated studies, in order to qualify for grants.

“If a scientist studies butterflies, he may choose to do a model ‘if/then’ study on how warming temps 100 years from now may impact butterflies,” Morano said. “The butterfly scientist may never even look at the probability temps may rise a certain amount, only on how rising temps would theoretically impact butterflies.”

Morano's lament of lack of specialization is the very same argument that discredits Morano's own list of 400 scientist "skeptics." Ciandella completely ignores that inconvenient fact.

WorldNetDaily is clearly prepared to milk the purported conspiracy regarding the indictment of right-wing darling Dinesh D'Souza for all it's worth.

WND editor Joseph Farah cranked it up to drama-queen levels with a series of tweets. First, he declared, "Public Notice: If I should be indicted for anything in the coming weeks, I just want to let everyone know I'm innocent of any and all charges."

That was immediately followed the statement, "Public Notice 2: If I should meet an untimely, unexplainable death in 2014, there is an obvious explanation."

Besides, Farah pulled this same drama-queen stunt 15 years ago, when he went to Arkansas to give a deposition supporting factually challenged anti-Clinton documentarian Patrick Matrisciana. He wrote in a 1999 column:

Gennifer Flowers, Bill Clinton’s long-time mistress, told Chris Matthews the other day that she avoided the Clinton killing fields by remaining high-profile — even if she was ridiculed, dismissed, rebuffed and scoffed at by most of the establishment press.

Matthews asked her if she really believed the man she loved for so many years — Bill Clinton — had actually ordered people to be killed. Without batting an eyelash, Flowers answered affirmatively.

I’m following the Gennifer Flowers strategy.

If my plane should blow up or get hijacked by terrorists, if I should suddenly become depressed and shoot myself with someone else’s gun leaving no fingerprints, if I should suffer a heart attack after eating in a Little Rock restaurant — just add my name to the list, folks.

It seems that Farah just wants some attention -- apparently, he's a little jealous that D'Souza is getting all the sweet, sweet conspiracy action right now.

So the Media Research Center's Tim Graham complains about "press releases" being published in the media -- except when they're published by the MRC's own "news" operation, CNS.

Barbara Hollingsworth cranks out another one-source wonder in a Jan. 23 article, in which she uncritically promotes a proposed Republican National Committee resolution stating that "Candidates who stay silent on pro-life issues do not identify with key voters, fail to alert voters to Democrats’ extreme pro-abortion stances, and have lost their elections." The only person Hollingsworth quotes in the article is the author of the resolution, and she makes no effort to offer up an alternative view.

But, apparently, this kind of press-release reporting is OK with Graham as long as it promotes the right-wing agenda.

Leavened with malice and deceit, they rise to power, these hardcore socialists like Obama. Once positioned to do so, they move to consolidate unbridled tyranny. Their infamous goal: to impose the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

[...]

In dealing with the threat Obama represents, Americans have come to the point Abraham Lincoln recognized as critical in the affairs of a free people. It is the point where we must say, “Passion has helped us” but no longer helps enough. Demonstrations and rallies and fervent pleas petitioning those in government may vent our feelings, but they cannot, by themselves, secure our goal. As people loyal to the republican form of government the Constitution aims to perpetuate we must – here, now and urgently – act on the logic of self-disciplined liberty from which it derives.

With “reason, cold calculating, unimpassioned reason” we must look to the impeachment/removal process, laid out in the U.S. Constitution, to “furnish … the materials for our … support and defence” of liberty.

To this end, it falls upon We the People to fashion appropriate non-violent civil disobedience to get rid of Obama. If Gandhi could cause the fall of the British Empire in India, if the masses in Egypt could rid themselves of the Muslim Brotherhood and if the Poles could cast off communism years ago, then we Americans can send Barack Hussein Obama – the most unethical and corrupt president in American history – packing. The time has now come to put words to deeds and wage the Second American Revolution.

Indeed, once caught abusing his executive authority to target the very U.S. citizens he’s sworn to serve, even a nominally honorable man would immediately reverse course, resign and accept the consequences of his illegal actions.

May Gates’s memoir and the subsequent public debate it will engender open up the gates of hell against Obama, Hillary and the Democratic Socialist Party for committing treason against our heroic troops who gave their lives, blood and treasure in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars … for nothing.

Does Obama really believe that a nation could elect a black president in 2008 while black Americans had still not achieves “anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality”? Perhaps he does. Perhaps he thinks he’s that special – a monumental personality who could overcome the racist tendencies of a country by getting elected to the highest office in the land, a nation not even close to approaching equality in theory or reality.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright recently emerged from under the proverbial bus to address a crowd celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Asserting that there was “unfinished business” in the civil rights struggle with regard to a “voting rights bill gutted by a right-wing dominated Supreme Court,” he went on to compare the tea party to lynch mobs of the Old South and claimed that “some folks [are] doing everything they can to get that black man out of their White House” (emphasis added).

And well we should be doing everything we can to get that black man out of our White House – but it has nothing to do with his being black. It has to do with his being a subversive, a saboteur, an Islamist-enabler and a Marxist whose objectives are all focused upon destroying this nation as an ongoing economic concern, a world power and a functioning republic.

Why would an individual sworn to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States show such little concern respecting things that assault the practical basis for the form of government it establishes? There is no answer consistent with his oath. Instead such nonchalance is solid evidence that Obama targets America’s liberty, as do all those who belittle the significance of issues that affect the moral judgment and character of the American people.

Much like the terrorists who targeted the Towers in New York, which symbolized America’s material commerce, these scornful elitists target the pillars of moral and spiritual commerce that uphold our political constitution. But when liberty’s pillars fail, the smoke that rises from their crater will signify the fatal triumph of our stupefaction, courtesy of those, like Obama, who are working hard to make us too stupid to be free.

Newsmax is standing on the side of Mike Huckabee when it comes to his comments accusing Democrats of believing that "Uncle Sugar" must provide for women who "cannot control their libido."

A Jan. 24 article by Melanie Batley repeating Huckabee's claim that NBC’s Kasie Hunt and CNN’s Dana Bash distorted his meaning when they “erroneously tweeted” his remarks. But has Slate's Dave Weigel points out, both outlets corrected their original tweets, and all reporting since has been based on accurate quotes of what Huckabee said.

Batley also repeated a Fox News claim that Democrats were "trying to fundraise off of Mr. Huckabee's taken-out-of-context quotes." But she didn't report that Huckabee is fund-raising off his remarks too.

John Gizzi joined in with a Jan. 24 article touting how Republicans "rallied behind" Huckabee, complaining that "breathless reports in the media focused almost exclusively upon 54 words that dealt with the Democrats' claim that Republicans have been waging a 'war on women.'"

Then, in a Jan. 25 article, Todd Beamon claimed that Huckabee "again attacked the mainstream liberal media bias that led to inaccurate reporting of his remarks about government-funded contraception this week, saying he was 'offended by their misinterpretation.'" Again, the media has been accurately reporting his remarks. Weigel notes: "For Huckabee to be a victim here, the rest of the media would have had to rely on the botched quotes. Didn't happen."

Beamon also touted how Huckabee claimed White House press secretary Jay Carney "was reacting to a completely phony story" when Huckabee's remarks were read to him at a White House press briefing. In fact, as Weigel notes, the reporter who read Huckabee's quote to Carney got it right:

The next day, as this Twitter thread started by Matt Lewis demonstrates, conservatives were piling on reporters for refusing to admit that "the narrative" was false. It's a fascinating exercise in ref-working, an attempt to define Huckabee's gaffe as a media gaffe.